


bones beneath your feet

by Siria



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Community: picfor1000, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-02
Packaged: 2017-11-23 11:27:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan walked down the stairs and onto a carpet of sepia-toned faces: hundreds of photos, thousands of them, spread out from wall to wall in serried ranks of some incomprehensible order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bones beneath your feet

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the picfor1000 challenge, for [this picture](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellywestmars/4165860643/lightbox/). With thanks to my beta, sheafrotherdon.

Joan walked down the stairs and onto a carpet of sepia-toned faces: hundreds of photos, thousands of them, spread out from wall to wall in serried ranks of some incomprehensible order. She paused for a moment to sigh and cast her eyes up to the ceiling; the stained plaster there provided little support for her wavering patience. There was no path through the photos, so Joan had to walk carefully across them. It felt like trying to move through some long defunct cemetery where the grave boundaries were no longer marked, and no matter how much you tried to be respectful, each step reminded you that there were bones beneath your feet. 

"Careful of the evidence, Watson," Sherlock said when she walked into the living room. He was on the floor in front of the fireplace, in a yoga pose that looked neither comfortable nor orthodox. 

She folded her arms. "Did you actually break into the home of a ninety-three-year-old woman and steal all of her photo albums?"

"I prefer to think of it as a temporary appropriation," Sherlock said, peering up at her. Seen like this, his face was even more angular than normal. "If the old bat refuses to—"

Joan looked at him. Sherlock had the grace to look chagrined. 

"—Since Mrs Leroy is _unwilling_ to assist in our investigations, I rather felt I had to take the initiative."

"Initiative," Joan said flatly. She looked down at the pictures on the floor. There were a couple of posed, formal portraits, but mostly the photographs were the kinds of snapshots that most families stored in boxes in the attic: lopsided photos of toddlers clinging to their grandparents' overcoats and squinting at the camera, excited siblings opening presents beneath a Christmas tree, a young man smiling and awkward in a stiff naval uniform. None of the faces meant anything to her, but they clearly did to someone, enough that they'd been carefully kept for over half a century. "Your idea of initiative looks an awful lot like a felony."

Sherlock shifted so that he was sitting in lotus position. "Ends and means. Besides, I've found that a careful application of guilelessness and a public school accent can change almost anything to a misdemeanour."

Joan sighed. There was probably some story behind that, but she was quite sure that she didn't want to find out what it was. Plausible deniability. She pushed a mound of freshly laundered, multi-coloured socks to one side and sat down on the couch. "Well," she said. "Means?"

Sherlock got that look on his face: the fleeting, pleased expression that said he still wasn't quite convinced that she really did intend to stay. "The key to the entire case lies in these photos, Watson, I'm quite convinced of it: there's something in one of these photos that will explain his motives. Once we know the why, the how will flow quite naturally."

"You realise there have to be hundreds of photos here," Joan said, "and we have no idea who most of these people are."

"I'm less interested in pedantry," Sherlock said, steepling his fingers and resting his chin upon them, "than I am in trying to discern a relevant pattern. Somewhere in here is something worth killing for."

There was silence in the room for a long moment, while Sherlock's gaze flitted restlessly over the photos and Joan sifted idly through them. She found one of a group of teenage girls—taken in the late forties or early fifties, judging by their hairstyles and print dresses—sitting on a carousel, maybe out at Coney Island. The speed of the carousel had been a little too fast for the camera, and the girls' pale hair and the carousel's lights had blurred together. There was probably a box somewhere in the hall closet in her mother's apartment stuffed full of similar pictures of Joan and Oren: summers on the beach, winters wobbling their way around the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. She rubbed a thumb over the image before putting it gently back down to lie with the others. 

"Did your parents take photos like these?" she said. "Is that a British thing to do?"

Sherlock looked up at that, staring at her for a long moment as if trying to detect some hidden meaning to her question. Joan looked steadily back, because it was clear that Sherlock had issues with his father, but surely things hadn't always been as bad as all that. Eventually he went back to looking at the photos. "Mother did," he said, just at the point when Joan thought he was going to ignore the question. "She always said that it was nice to have… to—"

He stiffened. 

"Sherlock?"

"Not what's _in_ the photos, Watson—it's what he left out." He moved, snatching up three, four, five photos, seemingly at random, but from the way he laid them out in a row, with precise snaps of the hand, Joan knew there was some pattern there that she didn't yet see. "Ha."

Joan rolled her eyes. "Can we assume the triumph is a given and just get to the part where you explain things?"

"Shame," Sherlock said softly, his hand hovering over the photos. "It all comes back to shame," and Joan couldn't tell if he meant Martin Leroy, or his parents, or him. 

Joan paused for a moment, considering her words carefully. For all his invective about his father, Sherlock had never mentioned his mother before. "I think if someone keeps photos like this… maybe it tells you something about what they're trying to avoid, but it tells you just as much about what they think the good things were. It tells you that they thought it was important to remember." Then she took pity on him, on the crumpled lines of his face, and stood and offered, "Tea?"

She was halfway across a sea of other people's memories when she heard it: Sherlock's _thank you_ was barely audible, but it was there.


End file.
